-
‘The Old Man’s Tree’ and ‘The Boy’s Tree’
April 22, 2013 | 4 comments
-
D-E-F-E-N-S-E
January 3, 2013 | 30 comments
-
The ‘Max Tax’ Amendment to the Constitution
December 21, 2012 | 68 comments
-
Obama as a Faded Poster
September 5, 2012 | 75 comments
-
Restructuring the Olympics — For Fun and Profit
June 19, 2012 | 6 comments
Another Perspective
Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan, and Assisted Suicide
What advice would the young Helen Keller receive if she were alive today?
It would be interesting to know if I am wrong in my assumption that most Americans know the story of Helen Keller (1880-1968). My assumption would be wrong if you are reading her story here for the first time.
While Helen Keller was in college, she told the story of her childhood in the 1903 Story of My Life and she appeared as herself in the silent 1919 film Deliverance. Her childhood was also the subject of the 1959 Broadway play, The Miracle Worker, and the film by the same name in 1962 starring Patty Duke (Astin) (b. 1946) as Keller. There were as well the 1979 and 2000 remakes of this film for television.
In 1904, Keller graduated from Radcliffe. The 1984 TV movie, The Miracle Continues, depicted Keller’s college and young adult years.
In 1964, President Johnson awarded Keller the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her native state, Alabama, honored Keller by placing an image of her on the U.S. quarter in 2003, placing a statue of her in the U.S. Capitol in 2009, and naming a hospital after her.
Stamps bearing Keller’s image have been issued by countries throughout the world, including by the U.S. in 1980. Several countries have streets named after her. And in 2005, India produced a film about her, entitled Black.
Why all of this attention? Because Helen Keller became both blind and deaf after an illness when she was 19 months. She was taught to communicate at age 7, and she went on, during a long life of 88 years, to contribute to our lives.
Apparently no one told the story of Helen Keller to the identical Belgian twin men, age 45, cobblers both, who sought and obtained assisted suicide in Belgium in December. Belgian law requires unbearable pain. The men’s pain was mental, namely, that they were deaf, and becoming blind. They were not yet blind. Being 45, they were not near the end of their natural lives. Their conditions were incurable but not terminal.
Apparently, too, no one told the story of Helen Keller to Jacqueline Herremans, a member of the Belgian Commission of Euthanasia, who said about the twins that “they would not have been able to lead autonomous lives, and that with only a sense of touch they had no prospects of a future.” (The senses of smell and taste are ignored.)
It was with good reason that Not Dead Yet was founded in the mid-1990s. The members are persons with disabilities advocating against assisted suicide vehemently opposed to Professor Peter Singer’s articulation of criteria for what constitutes a human being.
Many people associate the word Talladega with NASCAR racing and the 2006 movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. My background — as someone who lived three years with 11 teen-aged boys with mental and physical disabilities, and who served for five years as a director of the Chicago Bar Association’s Legal Clinic for the Disabled, Inc., housed in the renowned Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago — causes me to associate the word Talladega with the town’s famous Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind.
Reading of the story of the Belgian twins, I was reminded of my paternal grandmother who became blind when she was a young mother. But she raised five children. I was also reminded of my good fortune in appearing in Juvenile Court in Cook County (Chicago) on the Child Abuse and Neglect “calendar” before Judge Stephen R. Yates. After Judge Yates received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS), he continued to judge and to teach. He died at age 60, not of assisted suicide.
While you may not have known, or known about, Judge Yates, we have all heard of, listened to, or read books by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking (b. 1942), who has a condition like Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
I assert that the Belgian twins could have lived, and lived well, despite being blind and deaf. Note that they were becoming blind over several years so they had plenty of time to prepare for their new situation. Apparently they used two years of this time to shop for a doctor who would help them commit suicide.
But let me turn your attention from the person or persons with disabilities to their doctors, relatives, and caregivers. The inspiration for these people would be Anne Sullivan (1866-1934), “the miracle worker,” played in the 1962 film by the late Anne Bancroft (1931-2005) and in the 1979 remake by Patty Duke Astin. Sullivan had grown up destitute and in an almshouse. She was 20 years old, nearly blind and a graduate of a school for the blind, when she traveled the long distance from Massachusetts to Alabama to teach the 7-year old blind-and-deaf Helen. She and Helen Keller were to become companions for decades.
Twenty years after Anne’s death, Helen published a tribute to her in Teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy: A Tribute by the Foster Child of Her Mind (1955). There have been several biographies of this great teacher: Nella Braddy, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller (1933), Sarah Miller, Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller (2007), Marfe Ferguson Delano, Helen’s Eyes: A Photobiography of Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller’s Teacher (2008), and Kim E. Nielsen, Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (2009).
At Anne’s passing, Helen held her hand. And so, Helen had switched roles and had become Anne’s caregiver. For their part, the Belgian twins decided that they would rather commit suicide than care for any other human being, including their surviving parents and brother, who had pled with them, in Dylan Thomas’ words of 1951 “Do not go gentle into that good night… Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
Letter to the Editor View all comments (19) | Leave a comment
More Articles by James M. Thunder
More Articles From Another Perspective
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/01/17/helen-keller-anne-sullivan-and
Follow us:
ADVERTISEMENT
SPONSORED LINKS
FLASHBACK TO: 1995
-
Pope Culture
A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts.
-
Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck
Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids.
-
Dames at Sea
-
In the Absence of Guns
In Britain, defending your property can get you life.
-
The Metaphysical Martini
-
Counting the Costs of Clintonism
The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture.
-
Chuck McHagel
It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard.
-
The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted
-
It’s the Best Time of the Year
The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it?
-
The Bush Crack-Up
Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
Clip of the Day
ADVERTISEMENT
spike59| 1.17.13 @ 6:16AM
It is a good thing that Helen Keller was not born in this 'progressive' age...
Appleby| 1.17.13 @ 7:14AM
When I was born, I had vision so sharp that I could see an airplane regardless of how high up it was. Then I caught German Measles, and when I started school it was discovered that I was severely nearsighted. Increasingly strengthened glasses have solved the problem; but now I am suffering macular degeneration in one eye. I am probably going to lose a substantial portion of my vision for good. I am preparing for that day. And by the way, I'm really glad that nobody told my Mama that her only recourse was to have me put to death as a toddler. Can any toddler born today (especially those whose parents are hysterically against vaccinations for common illnesses that may leave their children deaf and blind) say the same?
beebop2| 1.17.13 @ 7:33AM
You have no idea what your mother was told but we know what happens to the "unsuccessful" partial birth abortion, don't we? It must be such a simple life to live believing that all good thinking flows from you ....
Appleby| 1.17.13 @ 9:17AM
Don't drink and type.
Doctor Right| 1.17.13 @ 9:59AM
Do you have an actual point to make, moron?
spike59| 1.17.13 @ 10:17AM
" but we know what happens to the "unsuccessful" partial birth abortion, don't we?"
----------------------------------------------
yes, we call it 'beebop2'
Tina B| 1.17.13 @ 8:50AM
What are you talking about, beebop2? And who to? Just trying to make sense of that comment.
Joellen| 1.17.13 @ 3:49PM
Tina, I hope to see you at the PRO LIFE march next friday - let me know if you're going.
C. Vernon Crisler | 1.17.13 @ 10:24AM
Our Declaration says we have a right to life. No one can rightly take away our life unless pursuant to the administration of justice.
This right to life is an endowment, a gift. The One who endowed us with this right is nature's God, the Creator. To take one's own life is a repudiation of the Creator's gift, a repudiation of the Creator, the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and who for Christians was manifest in the flesh in Jesus Christ.
We live in an age in which the Creator has been declared dead. Is it any wonder that increasingly man has a will to death?
Joellen| 1.17.13 @ 3:48PM
Well said C. Vernon!
dominic1955| 1.17.13 @ 11:48AM
Its a statement of cowardice and the triumph of schmaltzy sentimentalism over intellect, passions and will working in concernt.
I've always liked the story of Helen Keller-someone who took the decidedly crappy hand dealt to her and play it to the fullest. By outward observation as a young child, she was little more than a beast yet obviously in reality everything was there waiting to be taught a way to communicate past her failed senses. To think, today people would have probably advocated for her to be "put out of her misery" like a dog because she supposedly couldn't live an "autonomous" life. Eugenics still rears its ugly head even after the fall of its Nazi empire.
This is certainly one example of why society's laws should coincide with Natural Law and how suffering leads to greatness. In a society that expects nothing from you, can we be suprised when people are perfectly willing to just give up rather than rise to the occasion? We still see people doing this, but how long before people start "euthanizing" themselves because they loose a leg or their voice or hair?! In striving for "perfection" or "the ideal", we get a leveled playing ground of spineless loosers.
cicero| 1.17.13 @ 5:15PM
As we turn more and more to a soulless government to take care of all of our needs, is it any wonder that those suffering despair feel they have no where to turn? What are they to do, call a social worker? Call a government hot line for suicide prevention - that closes at 4:30 pm on Friday? With the breakdown of the family - largely due to the ever present "government programs", there are fewer and fewer instances where we can count on family to "hold our hand" as we pass thee bar. As we get further into the generations where "childless by choice" became the chosen option, we find that we have to pay strangers to pay attention to us in our dodderage.
Oh, sad are the childless, for they shall be without the love and care of children. Even those who were fortunate enough to have children have to deal with a generation who has come to rely on government and government programs to satisfy their obligations to their own. But I ramble . . .
Bob S| 1.17.13 @ 7:45PM
The story of Helen Keller is often taught to our kids in elementary school English class. Unfortunately, kids these days don't really remember, pay attention, or even care.
Helen Keller is exactly who came to mind when I heard about these Belgian fools. Suicide is the most absolute form of cowardice. Assisted suicide is plain and ugly evil.
spike59| 1.18.13 @ 5:39AM
i only hope that these twits didn't reproduce before permanently leaving the gene pool
hrgfue | 1.17.13 @ 7:57PM
2013 Happy New Year,NFL,NBA,fashion kickoff for u
Albert Constantine Jr.| 1.17.13 @ 8:01PM
Imagine if you will that the Belgian twins wished to die during the mid 1990s not because they were going blind in addition to their deafness, but because they were physically impotent. Recognizing the futility of life when there is no future possibility of sexual intercourse, they are permitted to receive assistance to take their own lives.
Then, in 1998, Pfizer releases Viagra.
Mnestheus| 1.17.13 @ 9:50PM
If James thunder were struck by lightning in the forest, would he make a noise ?
thinkingabovemypaygrade| 1.18.13 @ 2:17PM
Great column. Nothing like history of tough, strong people to remind us not to give in to the culture of death!
Occam's Tool| 4.22.13 @ 1:35PM
Interestingly, Helen Keller was a Lefty.